Bilal G. Morris
Project 2025 is one of the most talked about topics regarding the 2024 presidential election and for good reason. The 920-page Republican agenda aims to fundamentally change how government works, and not in a way remotely positive for Black Americans.
The conservative manifesto, titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, was created by the GOP think tank group, the Heritage Foundation. Filled with confusing and vague language, Project 2025 calls for eliminating the Department of Education, looks to abolish the ideals of affirmative action, wants to eliminate access to abortion rights and calls for eliminating social welfare programs.
The agenda also pledges to erode civil protections for the LGBTQIA+ community, criminalize homelessness, eradicate “wokeness,” end immigration and make it easier to fire federal employees who aren’t Republicans.
Many leading Black organizations, including the NAACP, have for the past few months, worked tirelessly to help explain why Project 2025 is detrimental to the Black community as well as other disenfranchised Americans.
During the Democratic National Convention, NewsOne had the opportunity to sit down with NAACP President Derrick Johnson, have a candid conversation about Project 2025 and discuss its potential effects on the Black community.
“Project 2025 is an effort to completely redesign the role of government to shut black people out and put us in a position as the disposable, cheap laborer,” Johnson said. “Whether it’s in the prison industrial complex or whether it minimizes our ability to actually earn a pay. What’s happening in this country, they’re running out of white people. And what this is seeking to do is to create a 1930 apartheid segregated America where only certain individuals who come from certain communities or a part of the white race will have a true opportunity to live out one’s dream and actually accumulate wealth and standing.”
He continued, “It is a complete redesign of government. We have lifetime federal judges. But they want to cement that in a way in which those judges begin to make rulings outside of the limits of the constitution, undermining everybody’s rights.”
President Johnson isn’t the only Black leader who is condemning the 900-page lesson on how to hate. DNC Senior Spokesperson Marcus W. Robinson called Project 2025 dangerous and dystopian in regards to Black Americans.
“Donald Trump and his extreme, far-right Project 2025 allies have made it clear that in a second term, they will make America a dangerous and dystopian reality for Black Americans,” said Robinson.
“The Black community suffered under Trump’s MAGA extremism, and now the looming threat of his Project 2025 plans include a draconian abortion ban that disproportionately affects women of color, ripping away lower prescription drug costs and health care access that has increased insurance rates for Black Americans to a record high, slashing funding for education, and gutting programs that help families make ends meet.
Trump’s Project 2025 agenda is just more evidence that in this election, the stakes could not be higher for Black Americans.”